The Issue: President Obama’s second inaugural, and the prospect of a liberal agenda for his next term.

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As a legal immigrant and a naturalized American, I listened to President Obama’s ideas with fear in my heart (“Prez Opens Up With Left Hook,” Jan. 22).

His true agenda has come through, and I fear it is built upon defiance and denial. By stitching together his constituencies’ grievances to create our national journey, Obama cast himself as the only one who knows where we need to go, and the only one who can take us there.

In his denial that the country is going bankrupt, that we cannot tax or people-please our way to prosperity and that we cannot be safe unless we are proactively engaged in a world on fire, Obama is fostering a sense of false security.

I chose to work and live here because this is a country that thinks and acts large, not a visionless, irresponsible collection of small agendas.

Marcio Moreira

Chatham, NJ

John Podhoretz is nautically incorrect about the S. S. “Omerica” (PostScript, Jan. 20).

He writes: “By 2017, it will have moved several clicks starboard — for a generation at least.” Starboard is right; port is left.

Current course under Capt. Obama leans strongly to the left, all ship whistles and horns blowing.

This cruise direction will do what the iceberg did to the Titanic.

Let’s hope Obama takes a more prudent course for the sake of the next generation, the inheritors of our run-up debt, by steering the ship of state straight ahead.

It’s similar to how Capt. Clinton went starboard in the ’90s.

Noel Feustel

Bayport

The unfortunate difference in the center-right shift we experienced under Ronald Reagan — and some of the progressive swings that we have since taken — is that shifts toward the left tend to be permanent.

The liberal erosion of our cultural fiber and the policy initiatives it has imposed, such as ObamaCare, tend to be irreversible once enacted. Scott Van Kuren